the API (Application Programming Interface)

This website is driven by XML and XSL. Any page can be requested in XML, HTML, JSON or JS. Simply prepend the path with api/.
For example, to make a normal HTML request for the Tesco company page:

http://www.xsearchservices.com/company/tesco

for the XML API version (always available):

http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/company/tesco.xml or
http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/company/tesco, (the default API output is XML)

for the JSON API version (always available):

http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/company/tesco.json

for the RSS API version (only available where there is an RSS sign):

http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/company/tesco.rss

for the HTML version (this basically just forces a server side XSLT, api not required):

http://www.xsearchservices.com/company/tesco.html

This is true for all pages on the site, including this one!

You can also use &forceMIMEType=text/html to manually change the MIMEType returned in the headers e.g.

http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/analysis/doc.json?i=Tesco and Toshiba&forceMIMEType=text/html

accessing the analysis api functions

These are standard pages located in the analysis directory. The pages you will most likely find useful for analysis are:

http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/analysis/url.json?i=http://www.tesco.com

which analyses the URI sent as the first argument (and replies in JSON in this case)

http://www.xsearchservices.com/api/analysis/doc?i=some words to analyse

which analyses the text sent as the first argument (and replies in XML in this case).
These are the pages used by the plug-in to get it's information.
Arguments can be sent through as POST or GET. The order is important and the names irrelevant.